The next shock that descended on Stokesley was that, in great indignation, a cousin sent the Merrifields one of those American magazines which are read and contributed to by a large proportion of English.  It contained an article called ’The Bide-as-we-bes and parish of Stick-stodge-cum-Cadgerley,’ and written with the same sort of clever, flippant irony as the description of the mixed company in the boarding-house on the Lago Maggiore.

There was the parish embowered, or rather choked, in trees, the orderly mechanical routine, the perfect self-satisfaction of all parties, and their imperviousness to progress,—­the two squires, one a fox-hunter, the other a general reposing on his laurels,—­the school where everything was subordinated to learning to behave oneself lowly and reverently to all one’s betters, and to do one’s duty in that state of life to which it HAS pleased Heaven to call one,—­the horror at her tricycle, the impossibility of improvement, the predilection for farmyard odours, the adherence to tumbledown dwellings, the contempt of drinking fountains,—­all had their meed of exaggeration not without drollery.

The two ancient spinsters, daughters to the general, with their pudding-baskets, buttonholes, and catechisms, had their full share—­ dragooning the parish into discipline,—­the younger having so far marched with the century as to have indited a few little tracts of the Goody Two-Shoes order, and therefore being mentioned by her friends with bated breath as something formidable, ‘who writes,’ although, when brought to the test, her cultivation was of the vaguest, most discursive order.  Finally, there was a sketch of the heavy dinner party which had welcomed the strangers, and of the ponderous county magnates and their wives who had been invited, and the awe that their broad and expansive ladies expected to impress, and how one set talked of their babies, and the other of G.F.S. girls, and the gentlemen seemed to be chiefly occupied in abusing their M.P. and his politics.  Altogether, it was given as a lesson to Americans of the still feudal and stationary state of country districts in poor old England.

‘What do you think of this, Bessie?’ exclaimed Admiral Merrifield.  ‘We seem to have got a young firebrand in the midst of us.’

‘Oh, papa! have you got that thing?  What a pity!’

‘You don’t mean that you have seen it before?’

‘Yes; one of my acquaintances in London sent it to me.’

‘And you kept it to yourself?’

‘I thought it would only vex you and mamma.  Who sent it to you?’

’Anne did, with all the passages marked.  What a horrid little treacherous baggage!’

’I daresay we are very tempting.  For once we see ourselves as others see us!  And you see ‘tis American.’

’All the worse, holding us, who have done our best to welcome her hospitably, up to the derision of the Yankees!’

‘But you won’t take any notice.’